1. Social listening
If you could give your business a superpower, the ability to know what anyone is saying about you would probably feature high on the list of options. Just imagine the potential. You could understand consumer sentiment of your brand. You could know how your latest campaign or product is faring. You could know if anyone is frustrated with you and put it right. And you could know what people think of your rivals and see if there was an opportunity to win over their customers.
By offering businesses insight into any opinion written about you online (via articles, social media, forums and so on), social listening gives you that superpower. Which means you know who’s saying what about you – and where they’re saying it.
Social listening is like having a superpower – the power to know what people think about you.
As well as analysing brand sentiment and share of voice against your competitors, social listening can also help you identify hot topics to inform your content, SEO and social media output. As such, social listening is a vital part of any comprehensive content marketing strategy, helping you create relevant content about current and emerging trends.
Social listening also helps you identify and reach out to potential brand advocates and influencers that align with your brand and help drive earned media. If you know of advocates already using your brand, they will be already amenable to a partnership, saving you time (and maybe even money) in securing their services.
In the midst of a likely significant recession, knowing what your audience thinks and responding in a timely, positive and personal way will give you an essential business advantage. Positive experiences increase customer recall and brand loyalty.
If knowledge is power, then social listening has to be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal.
You can read more about the power of social listening on our blog post.
2. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO marketing)
Did you ever hear about the hungry man who swam in a sea of fish but could never catch one to eat? No, us either. But luckily, his unfortunate story serves as a handy metaphor for many brands’ digital experience. In trying to land customers on their website, brands pursue all kinds of digital and offline marketing, they run four social media channels, they write a blog and employ a raft of influencers.
But it’s all for nothing because their website doesn’t convert.
Having a poorly optimised website – even when all your other marketing channels are working well – is like living next to a sea full of fish and having no fishing net.
You go to all kinds of effort so people know who you are, what you do, why you’re better than the competition – all that nice stuff. And then when it comes to the most crucial bit of online real estate – your website, where people spend their time with you – your good work goes out the window. And, worse, the people left disappointed by their online experience won’t be lured back any time soon.
Thankfully, this is where conversion rate optimisation – or CRO marketing – comes in.
What is conversion rate optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation is the process of increasing the percentage of people who visit your website (or landing page) to take a desired action. In most cases, the desired conversion will be sales, but it could also be to download a brochure, arrange a meeting or sign up to your newsletter.
Essentially, CRO marketing turns your online window shoppers into online actual shoppers by creating a website that:
- Gets to the point clearly and quickly
- Is pleasing to the eye but that puts function first
- Has search engine-optimised copywriting
- Can be easily scaled up
- Offers a sense of trust (especially important when you’re asking for people’s credit card details).
This, of course, is a process, one that starts with a planning workshop; one that involves strategists, planners, designers and copywriters; and one that includes lots of research and user-testing. In fact, testing is the most critical aspect of all, because the benefit of your website won’t be determined by what you think but by what you audience does – so you need to see and measure that. (The CRO marketing mantra of test, learn, refine, repeat should never be far from your thoughts.)
Having a poorly optimised website is like living next to a sea full of fish and having no fishing net.
Remember, even the most fastidiously planned web project is unlikely to deliver a perfect result right off the bat. Only once a site is launched, and only once you can see how real users behave on your website ‘in the wild’, can the real job of ongoing analysis and optimisation begin.
Sometimes, what seemed like a perfect solution or idea in planning doesn’t cut it in the real world. And vice versa. Sometimes something no one paid much attention to at all turns out to be wildly important.
The ROI of CRO
Cranking up the conversion rate of your website might be the best investment you ever make. Gains in conversion rate last almost indefinitely, so you spend money once and get return on investment every month thereafter.
CRO also acts as a multiplier for all of your other marketing spend. A conversion rate hike of 20% means that you get the same number of leads from 20% less media, so your marketing budget is working as hard as it possibly can.
A website is like a leaky bucket – or, back to our metaphor – a fishing net with too many holes and not enough net. No website converts 100% of the time, but by planning, designing, writing and testing your website in the correct way, you’ll turn more browsers into buyers.
Which, in a coronavirus-driven recession, will be more crucial to your business than ever.
3. HubSpot
Attracting and retaining customers is never more important than during a recession. The economic downturn caused by coronavirus will see your customers – whether they’re businesses or the public – be more choosy and consider value for money more than ever.
In order to bring new customers in and keep them coming back, you need your three core business teams to work seamlessly together – marketing, sales and customer services.
Marketing uses content to generate your leads and nurture them until they’re sales-ready. Sales turn leads into customers by demonstrating the value of your offering and closing deals. Client services turn customers into long-term advocates by solving any problems or acting proactively to enhance their own businesses or lives.
By using HubSpot, your business integrates the actions of all three teams, helping you generate more, better-quality prospects which leads to more sales and improved customer retention.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is software that helps your marketing team attract audiences, your sales team engage with them on a more human level, and your client services team delight them long after they first buy from you.
HubSpot’s suite of fully integrated sales, marketing automation and customer support tools is all tied together with a simple client relationship management (CRM) system and detailed reporting functionality.
From prospects to promoters, HubSpot lets your marketing, sales and customer service teams nurture audiences through all phases of the buying and continuous retention journey. More than this, its marketing automation features mean that you can set up sophisticated if/then ‘workflows’ making many routine, time-consuming marketing functions fully automated.
HubSpot helps you attract, engage and delight audiences, turning prospects into repeat customers.
Because HubSpot is all powered by the same database, everyone in your organisation is working off the same system of record. So what your marketing team knows, your sales and service teams also know. This allows for greater collaboration, helps you focus on which leads to prioritise, allows for smoother transitions between teams, and gives a better experience to the one who matters most – your customer.
Seize the opportunity
In times of recession, you need to maximise every business advantage available to you. Not just so you can survive the economic downturn, but so you can emerge from the other side in a better position than you started from. Recessions are turbulent, stressful times, but they are also an impetus to analyse and improve your business processes.
Through social listening, you can really understand what your audiences think about you, your service and your competition, and adjust your content strategy to suit.
Through conversion rate optimisation, you can make your website work harder than ever, turning more browsers into buyers.
Through growth platforms like HubSpot, you can make your internal teams work seamlessly together to attract more customers and keep them coming back for more.And, in case you weren’t sure, through Woven, you can do all of these. Drop us a line and we’ll not just help you survive a recession, we’ll make you stronger for it.